I can't help but feel that so many of these mini games in FFXI and XIV are poorly approached. They seem to ask themselves, "what kind of content can we make that don't add any coding whatsoever to the game we already have?" or "what kind of activity can't a bot do?" rather than "What is a fun minigame?" This focus (or copout) results in very flat content that makes you wonder if they're just mods of the same systems they already made for other things. In the mining story quest you need to make a pit in the ground. What is this pit? Some unique feature that adds to gameplay? No. It's a mining node in the ground that you strike. There is no pit. It's a text pit. MUD games have you make better pits than XIV does.

Breath of Fire's fishing versus any minigame in FFXI or XIV. Not even close. At least you can tell it's not just a mod of the battle system, or that the real point isn't to engage the player, but to prevent the robot.

Sadly that's the real problem with the minigames. They're not designed as games. They're designed as captchas.